The anguished R&B on Anxiety,
the second LP by Autre Ne Veut, brainchild of Brooklyn’s Arthur Ashin, may or
may not be R&B at all. In an interview with Pitchfork, Ashin admitted that
though “People who heard the album say, ‘This is so R&B’…. people who
actually listen to R&B are not going to feel like this is a real R&B
record.” But then just what is this
electro-pop paradise of an album, ringing with falsetto vocals that soar and
sear beyond expected R&B conventions?
Is it Top 40 gone indie? Is it a series of jams for
nightclubs exclusively catering to art scene kids hopped up on ecstasy? There
certainly is an inwardness and sensuality to the record, even as it seeks to be
“Ego Free Sex Free.” Too breathless, tortured, and oddball to gain mass acceptance,
Anxiety’s music still feels like it
belongs on sweaty dim-lit dance floors. Its worried handwringing is nearly indistinguishable
from a clubber’s bump-and-grind.
On Anxiety, Ashin takes
that grind and grooves and moves with the vitality of a 21st century
Prince, even if the work lacks Prince’s narrative velocity. Its cut-up,
stilted, semi-coherent lyrics capture the incomplete, unfocused trajectory of
the human thought process. Full of contradictions and blind yearning, Autre Ne
Veut uses words to prompt impressions, tossing grammar aside for flow’s sake. Hazy
half-finished phrases like “In the world that your heart is screaming, find it
Neverland” and “Don’t deserve baby and you follow you wanted to me” are more
felt than cognized. Recurrent obsessions with death and disconnection manage to
register in spite of the record’s intentional blurriness, creating a tonal
desperation that undercuts the frisky funk of Anxiety’s songs.
Autre Ne Veut is freakier and shriller than progressive R&B
peers like Frank Ocean and Janelle Monáe.
Employing tighter songwriting than the Weeknd, Anxiety nonetheless relies on similarly memorable moodscapes and
emotional expansiveness. Though it may not be a traditional R&B album, its
bluesy rhythms being overwhelmed by foggy synth-pop sensibilities, Anxiety is a slick and sexed-up production
worth getting anxious over, worth diving and dissolving into.
Grade: B+
